Clark Haaland
@clark_h
Clark Haaland
There’s a piece of advice I still struggle with, but that I’m more and more convinced lies at the heart of meaningful productivity, successful creative work, and a more vibrant life in general. That advice is: act fast. Move quickly. When you get a good idea, make it your default policy to put it into practice as soon as you reasonably can.
The Imperfectionist: Act fast
In his 2012 essay, “More people should write,” writer and programmer James Somers described this process as creating a mental bucket for an idea, thereby unleashing a magnetic force between that idea and the world:
When I have a piece of writing in mind, what I have, in fact, is a mental bucket: an attractor for and generator of thought. It’s like a thematic gravity well, a magnet for what would otherwise be a mess of iron filings. I’ll read books differently and listen differently in conversations. In particular, I’ll remember everything better; everything will mean more to me. That’s because everything I perceive will unconsciously engage on its way in with the substance of my preoccupation. A preoccupation, in that sense, is a hell of a useful thing for a mind.
Once you’ve discovered the right mental buckets, or containers, for your creative work, it’s time to maximize the potential for unexpected connections. But to surface those connections, you also need the right tools.
Most of us will never get the opportunity to live in the bole of a hollow tree, and probably wouldn't much like it if we did. But it is possible to be distracted by outward appearances. If you live in the middle of a city, a desert or a forest may seem an attractive haven of peace, but of course it is possible to flee to the wilderness and take... See more
In the Desert of the Heart
Hold to revisit later
Decades into his long life, the poet Robert Graves defined love as “a recognition of another person’s integrity and truth in a way that... makes both of you light up when you recognize the quality in the other.”
Maria Popova • What Love Really Means: Iris Murdoch on Unselfing, the Symmetry Between Art and Morality, and How We Unblind Ourselves to Each Other’s Realities
Teresa of Avila writes: “ This Beloved of ours is merciful and good. Besides, he so deeply longs for our love that he keeps calling us to come closer. This voice of his is so sweet that the poor soul falls apart in the face of her own inability to instantly do whatever he asks of her.”